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In wake of Liberty Reserve bust, Mt. Gox will require user verification

On Thursday, the world’s largest Bitcoin exchange, Mt. Gox, announced that it would require all users to “be verified in order to perform any currency deposits and withdrawals. Bitcoin deposits do not need verification, and at this time we are not requiring verification for Bitcoin withdrawals.” The company did not provide any explanation about why it was imposing this new requirement, but it did say that it would be able to process most verifications within 48 hours. The move comes two days after federal prosecutors went after Liberty Reserve , another online currency that had notoriously poor verification. (In court documents, a federal investigator in that case included an address of “123 Fake Main Street, Completely Made Up City, New York” to create an account that was accepted.) It also comes two weeks after the Department of Homeland Security started investigating Mt. Gox over the possible crime of money transmitting without a license. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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In wake of Liberty Reserve bust, Mt. Gox will require user verification

FiOS customer discovers the limits of “unlimited” data: 77TB a month

Yes, Virginia, there is a limit to what Verizon will let you do with FiOS’ “unlimited” data plan. And a California man discovered that limit when he got a phone call from a Verizon representative wanting to know what, exactly, he was doing to create more than 50 terabytes of traffic on average per month—hitting a peak of 77TB in March alone. “I have never heard of this happening to anyone,” the 27-year-old Californian—who uses the screen name houkouonchi and would prefer not to be identified by name—wrote in a post on DSLreports.com entitled ” LOL VZ called me about my bandwidth usage Gotta go Biz. ” “But I probably use more bandwidth than any FiOS customer in California, so I am not super surprised about this.” Curious about how one person could generate that kind of traffic, Ars reached out to houkouonchi and spoke with him via instant message. As it turns out, he’s the ultimate outlier. His problem is more that he’s violated Verizon’s terms of service than his excessive bandwidth usage. An IT professional who manages a test lab for an Internet storage company, houkouonchi has been providing friends and family a personal VPN, video streaming, and peer-to-peer file service—running a rack of seven servers with 209TB of raw storage in his house. Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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FiOS customer discovers the limits of “unlimited” data: 77TB a month

Tim Cook confirms: Apple spending $100 million to build new Macs in Texas

Apple is looking to bring even more Mac production back to the states. Andrew Cunningham Last week, we learned that Apple was looking to devote about $100 million to bring the manufacturing of one of its Mac product lines back to the United States. At yesterday’s Senate hearings on the company’s untaxed overseas pile of cash, Apple CEO Tim Cook confirmed that the new Mac would be manufactured in Texas. The computer will also “include components made in Illinois and Florida and rely on equipment produced in Kentucky and Michigan.” Moving away from solid facts and into informed speculation, AllThingsD  notes that longtime Apple manufacturing partner Foxconn has facilities in Texas that may be used to build the new Mac. Apple is also building a campus in Austin, Texas, indicating that the company may continue to expand in the state. The new Mac is likely to be an updated version of one of Apple’s existing product lines—a new MacBook Air refresh looks possible for the company’s Worldwide Developer Conference next month—but we don’t know which just yet. If Apple were to move production of any of its product lines back into the country’s borders, it makes sense to start with Macs—they still sell well, but compared to the iPhone and iPad they make up a relatively small portion of Apple’s sales, and Apple has less to lose if there are hiccups. The company has been testing the waters with domestic production since at least the launch of the 2012 iMac. Some of these computers (including our 21.5-inch review unit  but  not our  27-inch review unit ) are (or were) already being made domestically, most likely nearer to Apple’s California headquarters . Read on Ars Technica | Comments

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Tim Cook confirms: Apple spending $100 million to build new Macs in Texas

This is cool: Qualcomm shows off its Mirasol display

Engadget There have been rumors of Qualcomm’s MEMS-based Mirasol display for years now. Once advertised as the “future” of e-reader displays, the company is now showcasing its proofs-of-concept. Engadget snagged a  preview of both a 5.2-inch panel display with a 2,560 x 1,440 resolution and 577 ppi embedded into the chassis of a common smartphone body, as well as 1.5-inch panel on what looks like a smartwatch. A representative at SID Display Week, where the prototype was being shown, told the site that the displays were merely mock-ups, but that the screen will likely show up in other third-party devices. The Mirasol display is touted for its energy-efficiency. It offers a six-times-over power advantage compared to both LCD and OLED displays, which means it would be the kind of display that a smartphone would make great use of. It’s made with a micro-electro-mechanical system (MEMS) based on Interferometric Modulation (IMOD) technology, which Qualcomm says  “offer[s] users a convergent display experience with paper-like readability in almost any ambient condition, while consuming significantly less power than any other display available today.” Ars Technica alumni Jon Stokes explained  why the Mirasol display is so energy efficient in 2009: Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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This is cool: Qualcomm shows off its Mirasol display

Mac malware signed with Apple ID infects activist’s laptop

F-Secure Stealthy Mac OS X spyware that was digitally signed with a valid Apple Developer ID has been detected on the laptop of an Angolan activist attending a human rights conference, researchers said. The backdoor, which is programmed to take screenshots and send them to remote servers under the control of the attackers, was spread using a spear phishing e-mail , according to privacy activist Jacob Appelbaum. Spear phishing is a term for highly targeted e-mails that address the receiver by name and usually appear to come from someone the receiver knows. The e-mails typically discuss topics the two people have talked about before. According to AV provider F-Secure, the malware was discovered during a workshop showing freedom of speech activists how to secure their devices against government monitoring. The malware was signed with a valid Apple Developer ID  allowing it to more easily bypass the Gatekeeper feature Apple introduced in the Mountain Lion version of OS X. If it’s not the first time Mac malware has carried such a digital assurance, it’s certainly among the first. Both F-Secure and Appelbaum said the backdoor, identified as OSX/KitM.A, is new and previously unknown. For its part, AV provider Intego said the malware is a variant of a previously seen trojan known as OSX/FileSteal. Intego continued: Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Mac malware signed with Apple ID infects activist’s laptop

“SpecialisRevelio!” Macs use Harry Potter spell to unlock secret “backdoor”

Aurich Lawson / Warner Bros. Entertainment The Mac on your desk or on the cafe table next to you has a chip with secret functions that can be unlocked only by inputting a spell from the Harry Potter series. The SMC, or system management controller, is a chip used to regulate a Mac’s current and voltage, manage its light sensor, and temporarily store FileVault keys. Turns out that the SMC contains undocumented code that is invoked by entering the word “SpecialisRevelio,” the same magic words used to reveal hidden charms, hexes, or properties used by wizards in the Harry Potter  series written by author J. K. Rowling. That fun fact was presented Wednesday at the NoSuchCon security conference by veteran reverse engineer Alex Ionescu. While most details are far too technical for this article, the gist of the research is that the SMC is a chip that very few people can read but just about anyone with rudimentary technical skills can “flash” update. Besides displaying the Apple engineers’ affinity for Harry Potter, Ionescu’s tinkerings also open the door to new types of hacks. But don’t worry because they’re mostly the fodder for a hacking scene in a James Bond or Mission Impossible screenplay. “The attacks discussed in my presentation are attacks that likely only a nation-state adversary would have the sufficient technical knowledge to implement, and they require precise knowledge of the machine that is being targeted,” Ionescu, who is chief architect at security firm CrowdStrike, wrote in an e-mail to Ars. “They are perfect, for example, at a border crossing where a rogue country may need to ‘take a quick look at your laptop’ to ‘help prevent terrorism.’ I don’t suspect most Mac users (and certainly not those that read Ars or other similar publications) would be at a high-profile enough level to warrant such level of interest from another state.” Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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“SpecialisRevelio!” Macs use Harry Potter spell to unlock secret “backdoor”

Steam players can now earn coupons for new games by playing old ones

A profile decked out with the spoils of a trading card collection. Cool, but go back to the part about coupons? Steam Steam will release a new beta feature within its service called Steam Trading Cards according to  an announcement from the company. The trading cards integrate with a handful of Valve titles at launch, and players that collect the cards will be able to use them to earn coupons as well as profile backgrounds and other items to augment their Steam experience. The launch titles that will generate trading cards to collect include Don’t Starve, Dota 2, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Team Fortress 2, Portal 2 and Half-Life 2 . When players get a particular set of cards they can craft them into a game badge to get “marketable items” like emoticons, profile backgrounds, and coupons for things like game discounts or DLC. The badges can then be upgraded, or “leveled up,” by collecting the same set again. The info page states that half of any card set is dropped during game play while the other half is “earned through collecting prowess.” Badges contribute to a player’s “Steam Level,” and as that number rises players get account-bound items including extra friend list slots. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Steam players can now earn coupons for new games by playing old ones

The British ‘Atlantis’ is mapped in detail

Dunwich Beach Sutterstock A professor of physical geography has put together the most detailed map yet of the sunken medieval town of Dunwich using underwater acoustic imagining. The port town, often referred to as “the British Atlantis,” was a hub of activity up until its collapse in the 1400s. This was brought about after a series of epic storms battered the coastline in the 1200s and 1300s, causing repeated flooding, submerging parts of the town, and flooding the harbor and river with silt. Today it stands as a small village, but up until its demise it was around the same size as medieval London. Despite still existing at depths of just three to 10 meters (or, 9.8 ft to 32.8 ft) below sea level, the murky conditions have made investigating what lies beneath particularly tricky. Since 2010, however, Southampton’s David Sear—along with the GeoData Institute, the National Oceanography Center, Wessex Archaeology, and local divers from North Sea Recovery and Learn Scuba—has been exploring the muddy depths using dual-frequency identification sonar (DIDSON) acoustic imaging. Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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The British ‘Atlantis’ is mapped in detail

Cray brings top supercomputer tech to businesses for a mere $500,000

A Cray XC30-AC server rack. Cray Cray, the company that built the world’s fastest supercomputer, is bringing its next generation of supercomputer technology to regular ol’ business customers with systems starting at just $500,000. The new XC30-AC systems announced today range in price from $500,000 to roughly $3 million, providing speeds of 22 to 176 teraflops. That’s just a fraction of the speed of the aforementioned world’s fastest supercomputer, the $60 million  Titan , which clocks in at 17.59 petaflops. (A teraflop represents a thousand billion floating point operations per second, while a petaflop is a million billion operations per second.) But in fact, the processors and interconnect used in XC30-AC is a step up from those used to build Titan. The technology Cray is selling to smaller customers today could someday be used to build supercomputers even faster than Titan. Read 19 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Cray brings top supercomputer tech to businesses for a mere $500,000

Senate passes Internet sales tax in final vote, 69-27

Flickr user: 401(K) 2012 The US Senate passed an online sales tax in a vote this afternoon after a heated final round of debate. A small group of anti-tax Republicans, as well as Democratic Senators from states without sales tax like Montana and Oregon, argued vociferously against the bill—but to no avail. The final vote was 69-27, not much different than the 74-20 procedural vote that took place two weeks ago. The proposal has hardly changed at all in two weeks. The Marketplace Fairness Act, S.743, would allow states and localities to make Internet retailers collect sales tax from their customers if they do more than $1 million per year in out-of-state online sales. “Today the senate is voting to take a few more inches off the little guy,” said Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), who has fought the bill hard. “You saw ads taken out by some of the biggest businesses in the country. It’s easy to see why Mr. President. With this vote, what you have is big businesses being given the ability to force new regulations onto the start-ups, onto the small businesses.” Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Senate passes Internet sales tax in final vote, 69-27